


by the light of lesser stars

by abaddon (nothingbutfic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 23:30:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12519064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nothingbutfic/pseuds/abaddon
Summary: He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.





	by the light of lesser stars

**Author's Note:**

> Written post-OoTP, but pre-HBP, so hopelessly AU. Inspired by Nietzsche, although there's a lot of resonance with the works of Stephen Donaldson (the Thomas Covenant books, the Gap sequence) and Frank Herbert (the Dune series) as well. Experimental, lots of kinks, and very weird.

It is summer. The air is crisp, and the sun warm, not that Snape takes much notice. His affinities are with dark and shadow, hidden in all the secret places of mind and body and soul. He has a coward’s despite for the sun, for the open, for the chance of revelation and discovery.  
  
In that sense, the house suits him. It is dark and musty, full of secrets and decay. Like him, it exists for little other reason than it does; like him, it is empty and bereft of anything resembling hope.  
  
In many ways, it is also a mausoleum, and this gives him the greatest comfort: to walk the dusty halls of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place when Black cannot. Most others have fled, of course. The Order requires optimism, and there is none here. The Burrow, although far less safe, symbolises everything the Order wishes to think of itself: comforts both familiar and familial, trust, moral rectitude (and superiority), and life, life above all things, especially death.  
  
The majority of the Order is pleased at the relocation, and it shows in the softened expressions of the meetings, the compliments about Molly’s cooking which makes the woman blush ruddy in the lamplight and Arthur fill up as if he has any right to the praise himself. Snape does not absent himself from attendance, but he only comes when he is called and stays not a moment more.  
  
Most of the time, he prefers to be here, amongst the ruins of a household whose ruin he is glad to see, and the one refuge Potter has left.  
  
As much as he loathed Black, Potter always seemed a greater prize. Blinded by the hypocrisy of his elders to greater (or further) depths of reckless abandon, Potter seemed to believe there was something righteous in his selective application of concern and sincerity; like all children he thought that what he believed was all there was to believed, and like all children this was a dangerous, silly indulgence and doubly so for this child.  
  
Since Black’s death Potter has refused all comfort, all solicitude, all human kindness, if it can be called so. Instead he wanders around the hallways half wild and half maddened from grief and lack of care. It is not a pose designed to elicit sympathy; it is just Potter, stupid and human, when none of them can afford for him to be either. If anyone mentions that he might leave, he wails. If they try and stun him, he fights back, with wand or claw or whatever comes handy. As much as Snape enjoyed watching the bastard wolf getting a bronze miniature of Black’s paternal grandfather thrown down a stairwell at him, it was Snape who had to brew the subsequent analgesic potion, and Snape who had to make sure it was taken at correct intervals.  
  
It isn’t that Potter doesn’t take care of himself: he eats (if he is provided with food), he sleeps (sometimes), and he shits, as all boys do. Whether he wanks or not is hardly a matter of concern for Snape, as he hardly thinks the boy is experiencing some form of sexual dysfunction or psychosis. He simply avoids all contact, and if contact cannot be avoided, he stares with the air of melancholia and a distinct semblance of catatonia at whoever bothers to try and talk sense into him.  
  
Snape, who always knew Potter couldn’t recognise sense if it came along and offered sexual delights the kind of which would make the errant teen’s eyes roll up in his head and slump faint to the floor, merely sniffed potently and turned his nose up at all efforts.  
  
He has a survivor’s sense of preservation, and a curious tendency towards dignity; when Albus suggests he has a talk with the brat, Snape affirms that he does not wish to be the one having Black family trinkets thrown at him, and glides off.  
  
Another week, and Potter’s savagery gains a certain direction; he tears the house apart, spilling bookshelves, opening desks and pilfering through cupboards, hungrily reading any and all correspondence he can find, diaries, traces of the one who died and what he thought.  
  
“Tell me,” he demands of Lupin, haggard and broken and beyond any consolation.  
  
“Tell you what?” the wolf answers, twitchy and tired and able to cope with loss from the sheer familiarity of it.  
  
Snape watches from the passageway and gives the man a certain grudging respect, but Lupin’s weakness comes all too easily to light when Potter asks him to tell him that he was not like his father, as Sirius wished him to be and often thought he was. The measured answer Lupin gives him sounds like an easy excuse, and Potter, screaming, banishes him from the room with a tantrum.  
  
Lupin tries again later that night, and Potter just bellows in his face, one loud constant bout of sound that exists until Lupin silences him with a charm. Potter stands there, fury on his face and his mouth still screaming, mute, and Lupin brushes past him, and past Snape.  
  
He should have known better than to find consolation at the Most Ancient and Noble House of Black.  
  
Albus comes to see him; Potter will not see Albus. That relationship is too strained and too tarred by guilt and abnegation and vested self-interest, as it always has been and was and shall be. One by one Potter’s friends and fellows file into Grimmauld Place; one by one they attempt through thought and word and deed to offer him hope against his doubt and indignation; one by one they fail and one by one they leave.  
  
Potter’s desperation touches some fear in all of them, some hidden shame. One by one his friends find reasons to abandon him, and the Order moves so they will be spared the sight of his distress. They abandon him to a decaying house, to rustling curtains and musty books, to broken chairs and mess and clutter and the scent of ruination, both moral and actual.  
  
Potter walks through the house like a madman, like a ghost, endlessly haunting the memory of someone else’s demise. The scent does not touch him; it only drives him onwards, to find his truth before he decays like the rest of it. Black wanted him to be his father, to be worthy of his father, to think his father’s thoughts, but he could not, and now he bears that horrid culpability; the knowledge that his heroes were only human, and that he also may be so.  
  
His father died fighting Voldemort, _his father_ , and now the son fears he will prove to be merely an equal to that memory. And if he survives, if he lives, he proves that what his father had was weakness, weakness until death. He cannot (or will not) _be_ his father; he cannot (or will not) move _beyond_ his father. His father who is a hero; his father who was a bully. Black was both hero and bully, martyr and wronged man, thief and prophet and sage and fool, but he is dead and his words echo in the boy’s ears, reminder of both the boy’s failing, and Black's own.  
  
Torn between guilt and anger, he cannot defile Black’s memory nor escape the cage of the man’s expectations. No external source can be trusted that is not suspect; and so, as if struck down by the ecstasy of an oracle, dressed in rags like an orphan prophet, he situates himself in Snape’s path one afternoon and refuses to relent.  
  
Snape, who is neither madman nor ghost, stalks these halls with a personal interest in their putrefaction. Unlike Potter, he is real, solid, definable and culpable; with every sneer at ragged curtains or creaking stairs he can be located and identified, pinned down by the traces of dust on his robes and on his fingers. His bitterness marks him, defines and limits him, and Snape would not have it any other way.  
  
“Tell me,” Potter hisses, and Snape amuses himself by ruminating on ways to kill the upstart as he stands there, defiant and proud, like all Gryffindors who believe their defiance actually means something. “Tell me that I’m not my father’s son.”  
  
Snape merely hitches an eyebrow and makes to move away, but Potter darts with the unruly spirit of a wild thing, and the only result is another standoff.  
  
“ _Tell me_ ,” Potter pleads, and Snape decides killing would be far too pleasant for this one, if killing was an option.  
  
“Begone,” Snape mutters, contemptuous as if Potter’s downfall doesn’t touch what remains of his heart as much as walking through the remains of this house, and pulls out his wand.  
  
Potter scowls, and steps aside. He will not risk a confrontation, not here, not now. Snape is a coward and Potter may be a hero one day (like his father, Snape thinks sourly to himself) but today is not the day.  
  
The days pass. Potter asks him, begs of him, demands to know, as if Snape has his salvation hidden away under lock and key. The same question over and over, until Snape gets something beyond sick of the inquiry. He can barely manage putting food out for the brat without considering if he should poison it, and then finally he breaks.  
  
This is not the term Snape would use for what happens, but it will suffice for other purposes.  
  
This day, Potter finds him in the drawing room; or to be more apt, Snape finds Potter there. This part of the house is somewhat less tattered than the rest, and it is here where Snape has made his home, albeit a temporary one.  
  
For him, all and any sanctuaries are temporary at best and weaknesses at worst. Like many, he has tried not to become dependent on their possibility, and like many he has failed. The door is locked and warded, which causes no small amount of surprise when Snape retires for the night to find Potter searching through the debris of his life like it was inconsequential, merely means to an end. As if all Snape is a means to an end.  
  
The dismissal plain in his stance, the relaxation of his limbs is evident. He has no idea how the _child_ (he calls him that with a twist of his mouth; the boy does not deserve the recognition of a name, not here, not now) got in, but he does not care. The dismissal burns more than contempt; even the Dark Lord would consider him a threat, an irritation, albeit a minor one. So with his eyes blazing all a-fury and breathing hissing in his lungs, Snape stalks over to the boy and hauls him up.  
  
“What do you think you’re doing?” he bellows, and shakes him by the scruff of his collar. The brief flash of fear that creeps across the boy’s face and makes him actually look his age for once – young and hollow and terrified – is a benison.  
  
The fear dissipates soon enough, and Potter glares up at him. The rigid line of his jaw is enough to move mountains, to achieve the impossible. “Tell me,” he grinds out, “that I’m not like my father.”  
  
That is _enough_. Snape marches him sharply to the desk that lies against the wall, and sweeps what seems like decades worth of garbage onto the floor with one arm, pushing him over the desk with a elbow digging into the wiry narrowness of his back. _His victim_ is skin and bones and sinew, bound by the unruly mop of hair on his head and the glasses on his face. _The boy_ is _flawed_ , although a few tugs on his trousers reveal the shape of his arse, pale and round and surprisingly firm. That is perhaps the closest thing he possesses to perfection, although Snape, who has inured himself from such sights due to the sheer plethora of boy posteriors he has glimpsed over the years, barely notices. All even that is is a means to an end, and his contempt is fitting as he takes a cheek in a hand and squeezes lightly, running his thumb over the smooth skin.  
  
The boy is not so stupid as to not be frightened. He wriggles, squirming and seemingly even younger than his years have shown, and like all children faced with the inescapable dilemma of their punishment, he has a certain indefinable _knowing ahead_ of what it is to come, and it causes him terror.  
  
Snape does not relent; he has come too far for that, and his hand raises itself and comes down heavy on the tight behind. The noise seems almost delayed to his ears; the loud, audible smack of skin against skin, and perhaps it is his shock that does this, his shock at actually _doing_ this that makes things disjointed and slow, and even as pain and fear cause the boy to rise, straining against Snape’s hold with a strength that only terror can give, Snape brings his own old cunning, his own fierce implacability to bear, and shoves Potter so hard back against the desk that the boy cries out, smacking his chin on the wood.  
  
Potter it is – and Potter it was and always, always shall be – Potter may have bit his tongue off for all Snape cares, as it is Snape who will have to care for him and assuage his hurts.  
  
 _Smack_ , goes his hand again, and Potter seems to shrivel.  
  
Snape who has been left by default in this place  
  
 _Smack_  
  
-left amongst the delight of its corruption, a delight he cannot even partake in  
  
 _Smack_  
  
-left to consider always the boyhero  
  
 _Smack_  
  
-left because the others have always assumed that caging a predator somehow makes him weaker, not more desirous of prey.  
  
 _Smack smack smack_. The syncopated rhythm of his hand seems to almost speak a language of its own, but Snape ignores it, as he ignores Potter’s snivelling, nose drooling and cheeks wet with tears. There is blood as well, when he bothers to check, blood from lips bitten and torn.  
  
Snape hauls the boy off the desk and observes him coolly, not bothering to touch the trails of moisture that adorn his face. He turns him round, and Potter relents, too sore and too stung to protest while Snape takes stock of the redness of his arse, palmprint upon palmprint blended into one another with the force and repetition of the spanking. The whole area must be flaming with pain, and as Snape runs an index finger, soft and comparatively cool along the boy’s cleft he notices the brief flash of stiffness in his limbs, the slight jerky response, and the sullen glare of his hate when Snape quietly tells him to go.   
  
Like many heroes, Potter confuses the merits of being hard and being strong, equating one with the other. He wishes to be hard, to guard his hate; Snape understands that. He has held onto his hate for so long it is the only constant he has left. But unlike Snape, Potter thinks that hard is all he needs to be, hard and self-contained, brittle and refusing bend to circumstance and history, and so Potter will most likely be broken. Whatever physical damage he has suffered this day – or will suffer – is merely fleeting and ephemeral. Snape knows well enough to understand that damage is only passing, even if pain may be eternal, and he has always bent when circumstance has demanded it.  
  
In one last act of rectitude Potter staggers from the room in half-strides, unsteady and rigid, refusing to pull his trousers back up as if the sight of Snape’s crime would shame him. Snape merely snorts to himself and feels neither shame nor compunction; if Potter wishes to be broken, then he will do it and get it over and done with, and he stares at Potter’s behind as the boy walks away.  
  
It is only when Snape continues creaking his way along the main passageway, hard and panting, that part of him questions why he stays here.  
  
The following week, and Potter flies at him again, questions and demands and anger and hate. This time he has gone so far in depravity and bastardry as to soil himself, so it is up to Snape to immobilise him and peel his tattered clothes from the skin, to wash the brat as the last vestiges of the plumbing hold together, and secretly wish to drown him under the spray.  
  
As a final amusement, he organises Potter’s limbs in a ready display, still devoid of volition, but able to experience everything. Unbuttoning his fly is a simple matter; pulling out his cock a simpler matter still. Potter’s eyes gleam with an unsubstantiated triumph at the sight, and it is surprising how much Snape suddenly feels a great and incomparable inadequacy at the below average size of his prick. But Potter’s jaw is just as open as he made it to be, and Snape soon feels content as he rams himself between those thin lips, _thrustthrustthrust_ , and Potter hasn’t even got the reflex left to gag. Events proceed as they should, and could, and would, and Snape spills himself into Potter’s mouth  
  
A few muttered words, and Potter is free and active, hunched over and coughing his guts out on the mouldy floor, the acrid stench of bile and come adding to the already heady smell of staleness in the air.  
  
Snape almost smiles, and tucks himself away and buttons himself up with a steady, familiar action. He inclines his head to the coughing form sprawled beneath him as if congratulating Potter on a match well played, a futile challenge, and sweeps from the room.  
  
The next week, Snape opens up his room to find Potter sprawled naked over the desk he beat him over exactly one fortnight ago. His body is stretched, almost tight, fingers gripping onto the other side of the desk, and Snape can for the first time see the traces of his deprivations upon his body, their extent and their result.  
  
Potter may have been thought a pretty boy in the past, all creamy skin, dark eyelashes and strong, boyish jaw, but that beauty was so typical, so complete as to be almost unremarkable. Now his gaunt frame, the pallor of his skin, and dirty state of his hair combine to give him a hermetic like purity that is only enhanced by the scrapes and bruises on his body. As for the sheer look of despite that Potter aims at him as he turns his head round, sharper and cleaner than any spell – Snape almost comes underneath his robes from that, and the dry rasp of Potter’s voice only goes to further his arousal.  
  
“Tell me, Professor,” he commands, as if his willingness to whore himself out gives him power, as if Snape has any guilt left to give. “Tell me that I’m not my father’s son.” _Tell me he wasn’t a bully_ , Snape hears, _tell me you didn't deserve it_ , and also, _tell me I’m not going to die._  
  
Now, Potter is beautiful, beautiful and bending, rather than broken, and Snape thinks he might have a chance of winning after all. Kneeling, his tongue sweeps up the lines of his legs to delve between his buttocks, and as the boy squirms and writhes at the forbidden, wet touch (all the more because he would have always believed it forbidden) Snape inhales the scent of innocence and takes time to enjoy its fall, as any good serpent should.  
  
It is a shame, perhaps, that there is no apple, but Snape is hardly a student of cheap theatricality and Potter’s behind is its own temptation. In years to come, some tacky piece of statuary will probably immortalise the boy hero in neo-Classical style. Amongst the centaurs, goblins and stylised Giants of the Ministry foyer Potter will stand, naked and pale in stone form, naked and raising his wand as if defending the world from unseen dangers.  
  
Students of sculpture will flock to make statements on its impossible beauty, the boy caught forever in the harsh glare of posterity. The paedophiles will visit simply to stare, and jerk off later. The curve of Potter’s arse will redefine history. Snape finds this legacy amusing. Potter will never be able to escape his own immortalisation, his own youth forever captured holding him to account for the fact of his inescapable mortality. He will be diminished by what he is remembered best for; it is always the way with heroes.  
  
The wizarding world will want to remember him best as a boy; as if his own youthful courage and willingness to do what had to be done was an inspiration to them all, but Snape works two fingers into Potter at once and knows from the answering gasp that the courage of the young is hardly a chastisement to the old, but simply the fact of not having enough experience to know that survival is always the most prudent course of action.  
  
Snape buries his prick deep inside the boy, and fucks him hard, rides him, hands tangled in his hair and cares not for the bruises he may get from grunting, flustered, and bashing himself against the desk with each thrust. All hurts are meaningless. Is Snape not proof of this, he who sold his soul to forces far darker than rape many years before? If Potter is to win, these are the lessons he must learn; this is the way he must be broken.  
  
He comes some time later with a panting wheeze of his own – he is old, now, older than he would like and older than he would suspect, but never older than he would believe – and pulls out, curling his fingers around his wand to bluntly mutter a cleaning charm over himself. Potter he leaves to his own devices; the boy has lived in filth for two months now, and must be well accustomed.  
  
Potter leans against the desk, breathing sharp and shallow, before his stance tightens. His shoulders hunch, and then relax, relax to the point where it seems he has no tension, no care, no fear at all, but even that freedom carries with it a sort of dangerous stillness, beyond all capture and restraint other than the self-imposed. When he turns, Snape flinches at the triumph in his eyes, even if he does not understand it. Potter’s trials and Snape’s own treatment have burned away the mundane, the ordinary, the failure in him; he reeks of triumph and apotheosis, of conclusions. Snape has pushed him to a place where he can no longer follow or even observe.  
  
“ _My father_ ,” Potter breathes, and it echoes with the force of gospel, “would never have let you fuck him.”  
  
With a whipcrack of power, Potter picks up his wand from the desk and disappears into nothingness. Later, Snape finds out the boy managed a blind translocation from Grimmauld Place to the Burrow without any training and through any number of wards, and learns to be afraid.

*  
  
School starts a month later. Autumn. Potter is there, sitting smug and sincere in his classes. He does not raise his hand, does not answer questions, does not fuss or make trouble and yet every inch of his stance radiates a cool, casual certainty that Snape is completely irrelevant and beyond the worth of knowing.  
  
In apoplectic fury, Snape hurls insults at all who can stand it, and many who cannot. Granger he piles up with detentions, Longbottom he reduces to tears, and he personally dunks Macmillan in a cauldron when he gets an experiment wrong.  
  
Snape is relieved of classes for a day, and spends his time walking the halls. Late – so late that not even a prefect or Quidditch captain or Head Boy could even come up with something vaguely resembling an excuse – he stalks the halls and seeks a potent sign of corruption, as he did at Grimmauld Place. He finds it some short while after midnight, hearing voices in a passageway near the Slytherin dorms.  
  
“Do you want to end up like your father?” asks a voice, and Snape stills, ears straining for the source. Potter’s voice, and he turns, striding back the way he came.  
  
Potter is there, just around a corner, and he has Draco Malfoy cornered against a wall. He leans into Draco, over Draco, looming and yet somehow tender, falsely tender, but the strength of his convictions leads him to do anything, dare anything, sanctifying all falseness in the name of his intent.  
  
Snape recognises that Potter no longer feels guilt. He is beyond mere morality now.  
  
“No,” Draco almost whimpers, caught between the impossibility of stretching away from Potter, and towards Potter as well. “I don’t want to go to Azkaban.”  
  
Snape holds his breath, and watches. Draco had always been weak, weak and wanting. From birth he had been undermined by a father who wanted an heir but no rival; a son but no threat. Draco always bent his reed to whichever strong power could sway him, and it seems clear that Potter is taking advantage. His voice whispers against Draco’s skin, making him yearn for contact; from a distance it seems like a more intimate caress than any physical contact could ever give, and Draco falls under the spell of that voice and that surety.  
  
Tom Riddle would have been envious of that sort of command, and Snape is reminded of his old master for not the first time.  
  
For a second Potter glimpses over at him; for a second he is seen. But Potter continues; if he did see him, than it doesn’t matter. Snape is a true irrelevance in every sense of both words, and that is enough to make him watch, abject and petty, but he is used to both by now.  
  
The following morning a familiar rage fills him, pointed and aware of his own turpitude. It is enough to make wise first years split at the sight of him, second years take on bloody injury rather than get in his way, and as the rumours spread amongst the student body, half his entire NEWT level class decides to suddenly come down with the plague.  
  
That he is frightening is not enough; that he is terrible barely suffices. The students are a rabble, disjoined and terrified by shadows, shitting themselves at the thought of Voldemort, Voldemort whom Snape has _seen_ and _known_ and _betrayed_ – in his final class for the day he gives Draco Malfoy detention for a spurious reason, and when the boy arrives later that evening, he fucks him over a table because he can and because he will not let Potter have victory over all things.  
  
Snape is always at his worst when he is already beaten.  
  
“Do you really think he would take care of you?” Snape enquires, thrusting into the form beneath him, surprisingly more flabby than Potter’s, less sanctified.  
  
“Do you honestly think he would _love_ a thing like you?”  
  
Malfoy whines and moans, sad and empty, begging for it to be over and fighting every step of the way, dressing himself and running back to his dorm as fast as his legs can carry him.  
  
When Potter passes by him in the corridor the next day, he grins jauntily, eyes gleaming with knowledge. Draco has made his choice, and Potter is consumed by that act of loyalty, so taken with his terrible purpose that the beauty in him is too bright now; he is too pure, too unafraid.  
  
Snape can barely stand to see; he turns away, and Potter moves on.

*  
  
Winter. War comes, as it was always going to, and Snape does what he does best: survive. He plots and spies where he can, aids when he has to, and kills when he either has no choice or actively looks to enjoy himself. Age has made him brittle, his politics have made him isolated, and all these particulars have conspired to left him determined to fight with whatever strength he has left. However sour and bitter life may have become he did not go through it all to die now, because hate is all he has. He holes himself down in a small creaky dwelling in the Cotswolds, emerging for supplies, information or the odd spot of murder, and curses Albus Dumbledore and the vagaries of fate for bringing him to this situation.  
  
When he emerges for the last time, it is only because he hears that the War is over that it becomes the last time, and everything changes. He hears of a great victory in the south, of a plain riven with blood and fire and death, and of a final battle.  
  
When he hears that Potter lived and Voldemort died, he is not surprised. When he hears the only other two witnesses (or combatants?) were Albus Dumbledore and Draco Malfoy, he is not surprised. Potter is apparently calling their deaths during that battle a great tragedy, but Snape’s word for it is ‘convenient.’  
  
The funerals are huge state occasions, full of sorrow and pomp and ceremony, devoid of any meaning. Snape attends because he wants to see it, he wants to hear Potter say: _here is my headmaster my captain my mentor whom I betrayed_ , and _here is my lover my self my soul whom I used and who died for my sins._  
  
Potter does not. He doesn’t even mention the relationship with Malfoy, which is a matter of not some small rumour, and which does deserve acknowledgement. Snape is sure if he approached Potter, confronted him, the hero would have some rationale about not wanting to taint Draco’s memory, not wanting to give his enemies another reason to spit at the grave or defile his beliefs. He would say how he wanted Draco to have some peace, and refuse to confirm or deny anything.  
  
All in all, it’s a very reasonable excuse, and Snape should know – he’s lived with reasonable excuses all his life.

*

  
Snape has retired to that ramshackle hut in the Cotswolds and that hut has become his fortress. He prays that no-one remembers who he is anymore, that his regular grocery shopping has become too familiar to deserve comment or recognition, that he has become part of the background, and nothing more.  
  
It is Spring; Snape notices absently, absent because he notices everything, and absent because he cannot bring himself to care, and keeps living because he has no other choice. His choices are not his own to make, now. Perhaps they never were.  
  
Snape has a coward’s sense of self-preservation, and a martyr’s sense of pride. He still buys the Daily Prophet, he still keeps some contacts in check, he still owes some favours and calls in others every now and then, _he still keeps himself current._  
  
It’s as if he wants to be found despite all his precautions and maybe it is. The Prophet is little more than the rag it always was, and the world has changed around him. The boy-hero has become the boy-king and rules in all but name. Young man now, but already they are crediting him with every miracle and blessing known to mankind, because he is braver than Godric, smarter than Salazar, more industrious than Rowena and truer of heart than Helga herself. He even puts Merlin to shame, and without even having to lift a finger, the entire wizarding nation of Britain defers to his every need and judgement.  
  
All because Potter is certain, and certainties breed tyrants. Certainties leave no room for doubt, no room for change, no room for love or pity. Snape knows this for true, because Snape knew Tom and Snape knows Potter and Snape knows himself.  
  
A knock at the door, and Snape knows who that is, too. One final act of pity (or is it piety) and then all the ghosts will be at rest. Albus and Tom and Draco and him, a ghost before his time, as if all those years ago in Grimmauld Place Potter took Snape’s hate and used it to satisfy his lack of definition. What he gained, Snape lost, and he’s been haunting the world ever since as Potter did in those latter days.  
  
The sight when he opens the door is no surprise; Snape yearns for death now if only to combat the predictable weariness of his life, the constant grinding of his own certainties. Because of them, he’s become a tyrant as well, a tyrant of his own life, bereft of choice and volition as all tyrants are.  
  
Potter stands there, and looks impossibly young. Almost a young boy still, one with only the self-belief that a young boy can possess before the world breaks him and makes him anew. Maybe that is it; maybe he always was a young boy and Potter never grew up.  
  
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and almost appears to mean it as he holds the wand up. Snape feels an uncharacteristic surge of pity well in him for this curious child – _oh, Albus, see this, see the monster we raised together, see the hero we made, may the world be safe from his glory_ – but Albus is gone and only Snape is left to pay.  
  
Only Snape is left to assuage Potter’s _certainties_ , and the world passes before him in a blaze of Latin and green light. He seems to fall, free and forever, until the scent of warmth and safety gathers around him like a blanket, and a voice that could have been his mother holds him close.  
  
The rest is silence.


End file.
